Frescoes that will make your heart race
Arts & Culture news for the week starting 03/24/2025
This week I travelled to Los Angeles for work and on my two 6-hour flights I inadvertently treated myself to Josh O’Connor’s range by watching Challengers and La Chimera for the first time. I loved both.
I also got completely fooled by Spring’s fool this weekend as I left the house on a sunny morning wearing linen pants and a tank top only to come back home with my teeth chattering. Prospect’s Park looked like Woodstock and seeing everyone so excited about the sun and the potential of warm weather made me happy.
In this week’s letter talk about women helping each other, supporting each other, uncovering long lost treasures, and painting unhinged portraits. Happy final day of Women’s History Month.
I really enjoyed this breakdown of Italo Calvino’s book cover art. One edition of If on a winter’s night a traveler (a book that changed my life in ways no other book ever has) features De Chirico’s Autumnal Melancholy (1915) as its cover art. Fitting.
Angelina Jolie is trying to create a cultural hub in Basquiat’s former studio. Atelier Jolie was initially envisioned as a fashion collective, but Jolie pivoted to a broader creative space and is now offering studio access to artists and partnering with nonprofits. On International Women’s Day, Atelier Jolie hosted an event with Iranian artist Shirin Neshat which included a discussion on the role of art in political resistance, particularly in relation to Iranian liberation and global displacement. I’m excited to see where this goes.
More on women fostering community and helping each other out, Cultured just published a wonderful article on women artists and their mentors. Two quotes stood out to me:
Jill Magid on Joan Jones: “I love how Joan recycles her work. In the art world and throughout art history, there’s often this need to date each piece. Joan sees her work as a whole; she’s comfortable grabbing footage from 20 years ago and reusing it because she has it, there’s something that resonates—it might not be conceptual, but there's something about the image that, now, instead of being a performance, makes sense inside one her wooden viewfinders."
I love the idea that artworks are cyclical. They aren’t fixed moments in time put part of an ongoing, evolving practice. Artists have always repurposed, revisited, and recontextualized their own work. Artistic production is not always linear and it loops back on itself.
Sheree Hovsepian on Barbara DeGenevieve: “She died in 2014. I often wonder, if she were still alive, what would she think of what is happening in the world today as the culture of feminism is often centered around victimhood and government rhetoric is stripping us of our agency.”
This made me upset because its true. Feminism today - at least what I’ve observed in the US and Europe - doesn’t feel like a forward march but more like an attempt at clinging to the progress we’ve made so far. We’re desperately tugging the rope back to keep from losing ground.
Babe wake up, a new Lavinia Fontana painting just dropped.
Lavinia Fontana, Portrait of a Gentleman, his Daughter and a Maid Christophe Cherix has been appointed as MoMa’s new director. This is the museum’s first director since 1995.
Are you tired of hearing about how the British Museum doesn’t want to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece? Imagine how tired I am of writing about it. In this saga’s latest update, the Museum’s new trustee, Dr. Tiffany Jenkins, author of the book Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended up in Museums… and Why They Should Stay There has opposed returning the marbles as she believes that, Artnews reports, “museums are under no obligation to return or repatriate such artifacts even when appealed”. You know what I think about this, and if you don’t you can read about it.
Who knew the week’s best plot twists would come from frescoes? In 1933, muralist Maxine Albro painted The Four Sibyls at the Ebell of Los Angeles, a women’s club. Almost immediately, the frescoes sparked controversy so the club voted to remove them. Though historical records suggested the frescoes were destroyed, research by Meredith Drake Reitan, Ebell’s scholar in residence, revealed that at the time of the controversy, there was a group of women who wanted to save the Albros. They photographed them for posterity, but also had made sure to paint over them, in the hopes that they would be uncovered again. This January, Conservator Kiernan Graves confirmed their survival after uncovering small sections beneath nine layers of paint. But, there’s another twist. “Because the frescoes were covered up so quickly, they never got the chance to cure as frescoes normally do, Graves says. This rendered them in pristine condition but also made them quite fragile, which is why after uncovering several 6-inch spots and confirming that the frescoes were intact, Graves immediately covered up the art again.” Will we see the frescoes again? Will they ever be fully uncovered?
Source: LA Times Will any of you be at the opening of the Venice Architecture Biennale this May?
Two pieces news out of Barcelona this week: 1) three artists have been shortlisted to design the Sagrada Familia’s façade. The Sagrada Familia was designed by Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí and its construction has been ongoing for over 140 years (slowed down by, among other things, Gaudi’s death and the subsequent loss of his original plans). 2) Joan Miró hid a painting of his mother behind his Pintura (Painting) to rebel against “the middle-class aspirations to being ever so slightly posher than you really are.” Delicious.
Happy Women’s History Month to the diva who painted Trump’s portrait.
The prospect of warmth in prospect park